Fourfoot Said

Friday, 5 December 2014

It’s a Saturday. I have my
daughter every other weekend. She’s three. I met her mum by the usual bench. I always
bring a sliced loaf. Clued up pigeons heard the tiny crackle of bag and landed
close to my girl.

One pigeon looked at me. I
thought about shooing him.

And then it happens.

I knew it wasn’t just me
because of the fear and chaos around me, the way that people clutched their
heads to listen closer to the voice, to protect themselves from the sudden
madness.

A voice, a voice like none
heard yet in the sane world, spoke in all the heads on Earth.

I am the Creator.

I made you. I can unmake
you. Abandon your churches. Destroy your banks. Your beliefs are confirmed, your
rituals disappoint me. Put down your weapons. Feed each other. Abandon your
wealth as you would your worries for the two are one. The next time I speak
will be the last.

I heard the explosions, I
saw the smoke rise from here and turned as one by one, churches and banks fell
into dust. I felt coins burn through my pocket and melt into nothingness.

As I speak, I can hear
sirens. The streets are filled with wondrous, upturned heads. Some are crying.

I sit back down.

Pigeons peck at the crumbs
by my daughter. She looks at me, smiling, holding a crumbless bag.

What do we do now she says?

Photo taken from http://www.faberacademy.co.uk/News-and-Features/QuickFic-05-12-14

Wednesday, 4 September 2013

Greg Dyke, FA Chairman, has set the target of winning the World Cup for the national side in 2022. It's an impressive target and an impossible one. Our players, tactics, coaching are light years behind the giants of the international game.

There are many disparate reasons England have continually
failed at tournaments outside it's shores. I've long felt that the
Premier League has corrupted the culture of the national game. Without
wanting to make British football pre 1992 sound like some sort of
Corinthian feast of virtue and diligence, the obsession with money in
every aspect of the sport since the PL was founded has a lot to do with
our more recent failings.

Whilst the Guardian's David Conn is to be applauded
for his continuous highlighting of the stupidities and hypocrisies of
the fiscal side of football, he is a one off. Headlines now aren't about
promising new players, they're about the astonishing salaries they will
earn. Chief executives are now celebrities. And fans of, by any other
sport's standards, successful football teams, now spend their evenings
deriding their team's supposed failings during the transfer window.

I've
long suspected that the England manager, whoever holds that poisoned
chalice at the time, is not the only person picking the squads and
teams. The lucrative commercial interests must surely have a say. Shirt
sponsor offers the FA, say £10 million. Would like to use Lampard and
Gerrard on their promotional material. This material is produced months
ahead of a World Cup. Now say England get to Brazil next year. Will Roy
say "Well, here we are. I'm thinking of leaving Lampard and Gerrard at
home. They've had piss poor seasons and will have low expectations of
what we can achieve. Maybe it's time to pick some new blood, players who
haven't got a history of failing at major tournaments."?

No, no, he wont.

And
it won't just be because Sinister Sporting Goods Ltd have had a word in
his shell. Roy, like the last few England managers, knows the cost of
daring to venture outside the accepted version of events. The media will
crucify him because they have helped create the beast. How many times
have you seen a player described as "£75,000 a week ace" or "£40 million
rated" in a match report? Players aren't described as promising or up
and coming, it's all to do with their earning potential and it's
poisoned the well of English talent.

Yes, there's coaching
failings, there's a lack of sporting facilities at schools and grass
roots level but there's still plenty of kids out there with raw talent.
It's about nurturing that talent alongside nurturing the person with it.

The
usual suspects will be there in Rio. And Russia. And Qatar. And they'll
fail dismally each time. We've picked players on reputation and
marketability rather than form and talent for years. The FA won't admit
it, the Premier League won't admit it.

The England team is like the Rolling Stones. An embarassing relic trading on past glories, covering up its failing to catch up with the world around it, by celebrating and venerating it in a never ending world tour. The fans still come, they want to see Lampard, they want to see Rooney. They buy the T-shirt. They know all the songs and they don't mind paying over the odds for a ticket.

This isn't breakfast telly, Greg, You can't save it with a rat. The ship sunk years ago.

Saturday, 31 August 2013

For every £1000 lost in tax evasion, the government spends less than a penny on advertising campaigns to ask people nicely if they would refrain from cheating on the system.

For every £1000 lost to fraudulent benefit claims, the government spends £5 on advertising campaigns to get people to inform on those who cheat the system. And for every one of those £1000s lost, the government saves £12000 in unclaimed benefits. So, benefit fraud, whilst entirely wrong, could be seen to have a mainly negative effect on the economy compared to, say, not paying taxes.

For every £1000 lost to procurement fraud in central and local government, the government, for obvious reasons, spends nothing on advertising.

The country loses, by even the lowest plausible reckonings, some £1.5 billion a week in tax evasion. That's higher than the ANNUAL figure lost in benefit fraud and the same amount as the ANNUAL figure lost to procurement fraud.

My house is on fire. It's been set alight by arsonists, people known to me.

Do I a) Go after the arsonists or b) Throw petrol on it, c) attack the firemen and accuse them of setting alight to get more work or d) spend every spare penny I have asking the arsonists to think of people who we mutually loathe so we can blame them. Or e) a mixture of b,c and d.

Saturday, 17 August 2013

Sport and politics make uneasy bedfellows, as the recently deceased chap who caught William Hague sniffing Seb Coe's judo pants once said. For a hardline lefty wanker like myself, my love of the beautiful game (football) has in recent years come at the cost of doubting my socialist credentials. How can anyone in love with the idea of a world where Thatcherism and all the other neo-con schools are finally defeated bring himself to cheer a bunch of millionaire arseholes playing another bunch of millionaire arseholes?

Truth is, he can't, not really.

I console myself with the knowledge that the team I support are going to be underdogs in a large number of their matches and try to ignore the fact their star striker is earning north of £50,000 a week. But this is the Premiership, a league that has long contrived to reward mediocrity with wages even a Barclays chief exec might blush at.

So, with a week until the new Premiership begins, and a sudden desire to join the other countless fools who think they can write a pre-season guide, here's my left-wingers ideological guide as to who they should be supporting. Although, after a while, I forget the politics and make jokes about Martin Jol's face.

Teams owned by the singularly unappealing.

Seeing as the Premiership is basically a race for cash, it's impossible to discount the owners from our thinking. And Premiership owners are, like F1 fans and members of historical re-enactment societies, pretty awful human beings. Manchester City are owned by the Mansour family, a happy go lucky despotic version of the Manson family, who like nothing more than putting their feet up to watch Sergio Aguero after a hard day's turning a blind eye to torture, human trafficking and other wacky shit. Chelsea are, of course, owned by Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch. I've never looked up "oligarch" but it's one of those words that get linked with "disappeared business rivals", "bribery", "corruption" and "despotic autocrat" quite a lot. Close personal chum of that perennial charmer Vladimir Putin, Abramovich has transformed Chelsea from occasional Cup winners into the obscenely funded employers of the likes of Brave John Terry - a player who does his best to embody much of what is wrong with our national game, and by extension, our nation as a whole. Newcastle United are the only sitcom that runs on Sky Sports. A regional obsession owned by a Londoner who is to footballing business decisions what Ant and Dec are to heart surgery techniques. Mike Ashley, owner of zero-hour contract shitfists Sports Direct, gave charmless, trophy free Alan Pardew an eight hour contract on the grounds of knowing the words to The Lambeth Walk. And then appointed an even bigger Cockernee geezer, Joe Kinnear, above him. The club wear shirts sponsored by financial misery peddlers Wonga, a phrase so utterly London that one can only presume business meetings at St James Park resemble auditions for Oliver.

Teams managed by racist bastards.

He's so passionate! He's so chic! He ruins his suits! When Sunderland appointed self-proclaimed fascist sympathiser Paolo Di Canio, the last tiny cell of whatever passed for top flight English football's soul died. At a club whose connections to the local community, an area long blighted by poverty, were best embodied by their commitment to affordable ticket prices - such an appointment was even sadder. And when it made even non-executive board member David Miliband, a fucking New Labour cabinet member for Christ's sake, walk off into the sunset claiming a duty of conscience, well you had to smile.

Teams supported by that smug sachet of shit sauce Piers Morgan.

For all Arsene Wenger's devotion to an aesthetically pleasing Anglo-French take on the tiki-taka style of Barcelona, Arsenal are supported by Piers Morgan. Every time Theo Walcott scores, the self-satisfied wank-rictus of Piers Morgan contorts in delight. Perhaps he even masturbates. Add to that the fact that sniffing cocaine on one of Richard Branson's soon come space planes is probably marginally cheaper than an Arsenal ticket and there you go, fuck Arsenal. Fuck them.

A BRIEF DETOUR INTO ANOTHER SUBJECT ALTOGETHER.

Is it just me or is anyone else looking forward to the inevitable moment when a Virgin space plane, packed with Piers Sugars and Roman Mumfords, blows up in the stratosphere, the only recognisable piece of debris being a falling slice of Virgin-emblazoned fuselage crashing faster than the Virgin share price.

Teams owned by chairmen who dare to pay for their new club's success and then reward the fans by adding an animal to the name.

Cardiff City and Hull City, having both been promoted in May, are both owned by Asian businessman very keen on rebranding their teams to capture part of the emerging "people who like their things named after animals or mythical creatures market". For many Cardiff fans, Vincent Tan's dream of naming their club Cardiff City Dragons is the last straw. Having made their Bluebirds wear red shirts was bad enough. Now he wants to add Dragons to their name. You might think a slice of gratitude might be owned Mr Tan, after all his time in charge has been their most successful since before the war. For now Tan has held off the Dragon rebranding but a sizeable contingent of their supporters are worried that they'll become the laughing stock of football should their club's identity and traditions be compromised any further. Hull City, however, have gone and added Tigers to their name, making themselves the most famous three word five syllable unit since the Bay City Rollers. Some fans are so up in arms about it they've written strongly worded letters to the local press. As far as I know, no one has ever taunted another club's fans about whatever creature is on the club's badge. It's not as if Hull have changed their name to Godforsaken East Coast Shithole Tigers or that Cardiff City have decided to rename their stadium Cavernous Monument To Out of Town Shopping Nausea. Still, tradition and all that. These huge pocketed millionaire bastards, eh?

Team supported by David Cameron, Mervyn King and Prince William.

It hurts, it really does. I've seen a Villa forward line of John Fashanu and Guy Whittingam. I've watched them lose to fourth-tier teams over two legged semi-finals. I remember Eric Djemba-Djemba, Simon Stainrod and Gabor Kiraly. But what hurts this Tory hating, banker loathing avid republican most is our association with the biggest shitbag in Britain. Not to mention Mervyn "oops" King and the Man Who Will One Day Be Heir To The Throne For Fucking Years. As if watching a team that still pays Stephen Ireland money isn't bad enough. And Randy Lerner was the single largest contributor to Bush's 2000 election fund. So, in a way, a very fucked up way admittedly, Martin O'Neill caused 9/11.

Who's left?

Liverpool and Manchester United are both way too large and unscrupulous to truly love. Both are owned by bespectacled American tycoon types who probably go to Bible groups and listen to the Gin Blossoms or some other shit. Liverpool's star player is the ever-charming Freddie Mercury lookalike Luis Suarez, a prodigious talent with a penchant for racist outbursts and biting opponents. Their manager is a fucking colossal David Brent-speak twat. Much of the traditional hatred for Man Utd will have dissipated following the retirement of Ribena-faced watchtapper Sir Alex of the Shipyards. But seeing as they were the first to really chase the title of COLOSSAL WORLDWIDE FRANCHISE WITH SHIRTS MADE IN ASIAN SWEATSHOPS, we can't cheer them on either. And they pay Rio "Whoops, Drug Test" Ferdinand and Wayne "Spellcheck" Rooney too.

Everton have lost their manager to the Dr Who job. When you lose your biggest asset to a fictional journey through time and space you are no longer a football club. Fulham are supported by both Hugh Grant and Keith Allen. And their manager Martin Jol resembles a blind toddler's attempts to recreate God with cheap plasticine. Tottenham recently turned down £83 million pounds for their best player. That's enough money to buy Cardiff Airport and both the planes that landed there last year.

Which leaves Stoke City, West Ham, West Bromwich Albion, Norwich, Southampton, Crystal Palace and Swansea.Stoke City are owned by Peter Coates, the man who also owns betting site Bet365. To compound the misery caused by the rigged illusion of gambling with the less than aesthetically pleasing sight of hoofing the ball through the sky to the head of Peter Crouch is vile and inhumane. West Ham are owned by the nation's fifteenth-favourite pornographer David Sullivan. The Olympic legacy is letting a man who makes his crust selling Widow's Friend dildos and Topless Nuns Monthly half fill the stadium of Ennis and Farah with the footballing vision of Sam Allardyce.

Imagine being single and hearing these two girls whom a friend knows are apparently both keen on seeing you. That'd cheer you up, wouldnt it? You might get some action. So you go to the club and both girls look like the Moog from Willo the Wisp. And while beauty is only skin deep and all that, it still doesnt count as much of a result. But you end up sleeping with them anyway. That's what signing for West Brom is like. A club supported by both flag-waving convert Frank Skinner and the only man to resemble the back of Martin Jol's spoon, Adrian Chiles.

Norwich are managed by former trade union shop steward Chris Hughton, a man whom it seems to me is pretty difficult to dislike. But Delia Smith. Delia fucking Smith. Not to mention Stephen Fry. I love the bloke as much as the next chap. He's our Renaissance man. But he's too pally with the Royals. So that's Norwich out of the equation.

Swansea? I love their football, it's pleasing to the eye. But I live in Cardiff. People will see this and find my family and kill them. And Michael Laudrup reminds me of Laugesen in Borgen. So they're out.

Which leaves a choice between Southampton and Crystal Palace. Southampton are owned by an Italian banker. An Italian banker. Hardly two words that combine to think "Yep, I'd love to go on the piss with them." You got to love an underdog and so I'll plump for the Sarf Lahndn newboys Palace. They've sold their best player to Man Utd and bought in Maurane Chamakh from Arsenal reserves. Like trading in your Mercedes for a lift with Peter Sutcliffe.

Thursday, 25 July 2013

A clapped out fifties coach, no doubt
designed with daytrips to Denbigh in mind, coughed and spluttered through the
rain to the village to pick us up. We were stood outside the shop, me
and my sister, detached from the other kids.Mutes in any language; refusing to betray our
strangeness by speaking.

We got on after
everyone else and sat quietly at the front, heads bowed in submission. There
were whispers amongst the catch up conversation from the weekend.I could make out the occasional English word
in the vaguely threatening broadcast taking place behind us. One word kept
falling from the crowded noise like a reluctant volunteer pushed forward by an
angry mob. “Size” “Size”.

The journey to
Tregaron only took fifteen minutes or so, the mechanical asthmatic dipping with
the road in and out of the tired looking valley, all bleak fields and dying
fences. Occasionally a leafless branch would reach out from the roadside and
crack its dead knuckles against my window and wake me from my dream. The bus
struggled with the last steep hill and sighed as it came to a halt outside the
uninviting concrete school. “Size” “Size”. Maybe it was “Sighs.”

We followed the
other children through a little door into a corridor typical of any school on a
Monday morning, jostling shoulders and bobbing heads, locker doors being banged
shut, the hormonal drone of teenage chatter relating weekend gossip. I located
a teacher who pointed us to the secretary’s office up a little staircase. The
secretary, a thin but kind-faced woman who looked a little bit like Gladys Pugh
in Hi-De-Hi, led us back downstairs
which had suddenly and magically cleared in the interim. We were led down a
corridor so thin it may have been designed with the secretary in mind. Stopping outside a classroom, the secretary led my sister in, a brief
moment of noise and then silence as the door closed again behind her.

Then it was my
turn. The secretary explained to me that there were lots of English children at
the school now, and that each year in the school had a form for these children,
one for Welsh speakers and one for children who needed extra help with their
lessons. Rhyd, Bont and Llan.

We were making
our way into Rhyd 3. The third year for English kids. It was chaos. The room
was packed and the teacher was struggling to make himself heard as he opened
his register book.

The secretary
told him my name. The teacher looked at me and said “We’ve got 42 in here now.
You’ll have to go to a different class. Take him to Bont.”

Any relief felt
at not immediately being categorised as someone with learning difficulties
evaporated in the instance I entered another class on the far side of the
school.The secretary was clearly
explaining the situation to the new teacher, a Miss Jenkins.

Miss Jenkins
seemed nice enough, told me to grab a seat and smiled. It was the last smile
I’d see for a while. The room was suddenly filled with hateful grimaces from
the other children.The teacher took the
register; I noticed they didn’t do it by surname like in London but by first
name.

“Llyr. Rhydian.
Bedwyr. Angharad. Sioned.”

These names
sounded like some mad spell designed to raise the dead.Soon everyone was on their feet and I
followed blindly, guided by magic to a school hall for morning assembly.Ours was the last form in, no doubt my fault.
A hymn sheet was stuffed in my hand as I entered. The headmaster took to the
stage, dressed in his graduation gown.At the moment he reached the lectern, he nodded to the pianist to cease
her playing.There was silence save for
the frantic panic of my heart trying to jump free from my chest and return to
England.

This was Dr.
Rees, the headmaster. He spoke almost entirely in Welsh; no doubt he was
instructing the Welsh speaking children that both I and my sister would be
stoned to death in the quadrangle this afternoon and that this feature would
replace the swimming gala.

Another nod from
the head and the pianist resumed her work, accompanied on percussion by the
flapping of a hundred hymn sheets being unfurled. I glanced at the sheet.
Laminated anagrams. My eyes traced the letters across the page but I couldn’t
work out what was going on.

“Efengyl
tangnefedd. O rhed dros y byd.” The chorus of an old song was being worried in
a couple of hundred ways.

I felt as though
a thousand burning eyes were melting holes in the back of my head. Even the
teachers who flanked the hall seemed to be shooting me glances of contempt. No
point in me trying to sing along, not even worth lip synching. My eyes
carefully navigated the hall until I saw my sister, suddenly looking much
smaller, staring at her own hymn sheet; listening to her own homesick heart.

Sunday, 21 July 2013

The final segment of Pixar’s
generation-spanning Toy Story trilogy has rightly attracted a great deal of
praise for pulling off the rare feat of making a heart warming film that stays
just the right side of sentimental without ever veering into histrionics or
cliché. A number of theories have sprung up on what the stories themselves
actually symbolise. In The Guardian, respected film critic Peter Bradshaw
suggests that the discarding of one’s childhood toys represents our mordant
fear of being rejected by our own children in our twilight years.

With the kind of what the heck enthusiasm I
used to reserve for swallowing shit E’s in the 1990’s, I’ve decided to throw my
own two pennorth into the ring. Never mind the fact that with my paltry A-level
in Film Studies (grade A, suck on that Kermode) and a knowledge of cinema
summed up by only six visits to the pictures (the pictures!!) this century, I’m
as well-qualified to comment on film theory as Martine McCutcheon is on the
Korea crisis. That doesn’t matter. For, as Simon Cowell surely said of Amanda Holden, “qualified, schmalified”

My theory is basically that Toy Story is
essentially a film about the mortality of masculinity. It’s a theory that
evolved over a number of half-drunken minutes contemplating the marketing
possibilities of my almost-written film Titantric,
in which Leonardo Di Caprio fucks a boat for hours without coming. Don’t tell
me that won’t work, he’s in a film where he walks around in people’s heads
right now. Ludicrous. And don’t tell me you’ve never found yourself looking
longingly at a catamaran and found yourself in a need for a cold compress.

Basically, how it works is this. Andy is the modern American male in crisis, we barely hear him talk but we do hear the voice of that most
recognisably Everyman of contemporary American culture, Tom Hanks. Tom is the
voice of a cowboy, Woody. Now we can all go on about Woody representing some
kind of homespun version of traditional Americana but he’s not. Woody is a
penis. He’s Andy’s favourite toy in the first film, always playing with him.
But what comes along to threaten his love of playing with his old chap. Buzz
Lightyear. Buzz is drink, Buzz is drugs. Buzz is the distraction, the shiny new
plaything. Andygoes from thinking about
his old chap all day to reaching for the stars. There’s probably something
important here about all of this being meta-textual and what have you but I’m
on a roll now, this bong is starting to kick in and you’ll just have to bear
with me.

Woody’s not physically attached to Andy but
he might as well by, his dilemmas all spring from separation from his owner.
Fear of castration and all that, a fear better symbolised by Woody’s continual
losing of the hat. Yeah, yeah it’s Indiana Jones again I know but Indy’s hat
symbolised a longing for being buttfucked. I read it in Take A Break. When
Woody loses his hat, it’s a metaphor for being castrated.

Buzz is so clearly a cipher for hedonism.
Like the erectile pun of Woody, Buzz’s name springs from the spine-tingling
adrenalin rush one can only get from sitting around in the same clothes for
five days straight smoking something you think might have been called “Summer
Storm” but are now beginning to wonder if he didn’t actually say “Domestos”.
Who in all three adventures goes mad, Buzz does. Buzz is the one who most
clearly wrestles with his ego, his id. Buzz is the one who gets to go all
Mexican, express his feminine side, and of course, convince himself of his
ability to fly. He’s a space cadet.

Back in a sec, I just kicked over some
Lilt. Fuck it, I’ll do it tomorrow.

The trilogy is basically still a story
about growing up but it’s not so much the transition from childhood to
maturity, as the rite of passage we must all make in between impregnating our
first wanksock and gassing ourselves in a garage before the grandchildren come
round for tea. It’s the hell of domesticity that Woody and the gang find
themselves in constant battle with, despite the fact that that gang contains Mr
and Mrs Potato Head whose love for each other is depicted in an endless display
of self-harm, accidental disfigurement and transubstantive tortilla-based shape
shifting. Suck on that, Mike Leigh, suck on that.

Anyway, that’s it. Andy’s toys represent
all the conflicting fun urges he could be acting upon. Apart from Woody and
Buzz, there’s cars (Bullseye), girls (Jessie), munchies (Ham), erm green
dinosaurs. Look, I know I’m right. Science is just what they think they know
and all that. And the journeys the toys make in each film represent the various
forces stopping Andy from getting as much drunken action as he can be. In the
first film they have to escape from the neighbours (SOCIETY) the second they
have to escape from a wicked businessman (WORK) and the last, they have to
escape other toys (PEER PRESSURE). When Andy says goodbye to the toys, it is a
genuinely sad moment, because Andy is basically finished as a human being. He’s
off to college. He’s off to get a mortgage, a middle management job with Pepsi
Burger. His life is over. Cry much? I know I did.

And where's Andy's dad in all this? That's right, he's absent. Missing, presumed extinct, like those other great American male icons - the cowboy and the astronaut.

Next week, I’ll be discussing The
Cannonball Run with a view to expounding on my theory that Burt Reynolds
moustache grew thicker and more lustrous after Deliverance and that’s because
he basically liked the squeal piggy bum rape stuff.